A GNA
feature by Alexander Nyarko Yeboah/Thomas Darko
Tema, Aug. 10, GNA – A female tenant in one of
the communities in Ashaiman publicly insults her land lord, and as a fight
erupts, many people gather to either separate them or just hang around and
observe the spectacle.
And as the fight progresses, amidst use of
abusive language and threats, some of the spectators began to narrate what
might have caused the situation to those who cared to listen.
As curiosity drew me closer to one such
narrator, I learned with shock that the female tenant, who was still shouting
on top of her voice, obviously disgusted about how she had been treated, had
entered into a deal with the land lord to offer sexual services to him to
offset her rent. This had happened because her rent was due and she could not
renew it, neither did she have anywhere else to go to, and so the land lord
gladly took advantage of her.
This led the GNA to the offices of the
Alternative Dispute Resolution centre (ADR) in Ashaiman to determine whether
their outfit had had reports of such cases, and lo and behold, we chanced on
one such incident in which a land lord had had sex with his tenant as
compensation for inability to pay rent.
This only gives cause to believe that this is
an ongoing phenomenon which probably has not come to light because people may
be too shy to report such situations to the authorities or talk about them
publicly.
The question then arises as to why such a
situation could occur; a situation which takes away the dignity of the woman by
allowing her to subject her God-given endowments to undeserving men simply
because they could not afford house rent.
This is because the issue of social housing,
which is supposed to be a human right issue, has not been taken seriously by
successive governments. The nation does not seem to have a comprehensive
housing policy that ensures that housing units are built across the districts,
municipalities and metropolises in such a way that would help accommodate the
thousands of people who are not fortunate enough not to have their own houses.
And as we cast our eyes around, we see that,
in the case where governments have attempted to build houses to increase the
housing stock, it was merely to generate income because such housing units
target only the elite in society who could cough out dollars to pay for such
facilities which are ironically called affordable housing units.
And so, we sit in awe whilst women, like the
one engaged in a fight with the landlord, get exploited with the passing of the
wind, because their precarious situations are made worse by failure of
governments to envisage a policy which have the low in society in view, to wit,
that government would be able to house its citizens in such a way that would
take away the housing industry from unscrupulous private individuals who are
only in for their money, and maybe their pleasure.
Just like Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the First
President of the Republic of Ghana, built the Tema Township just to accommodate
the teeming number of workers who were engaged on the numerous industries in
Tema, Ghanaians are crying and hoping that successive governments would wake up
to the reality that we need truly affordable housing units that could take care
of the poor and low in society, because the pain many are going through in the
hands of wicked and unreasonable landlords is becoming unbearable.
The situation is even sadder when one wants to
consider the legal regime governing our rental dispensation in Ghana. Even
though the law is explicit on a-six-month advance for house rent, land lords
and ladies demand two or three years advance before rooms are given to mostly
poor and desperate tenants, not to talk about the heinous conditions these
tenants go through at the hands of their merciless lords and ladies, especially
when those property owners are resident in the same facility.
And so if governments could not provide
Ghanaians with a social housing policy, what have prevented governments over
the years from enforcing the law, such that no property owner could be allowed
to extort huge sums of money from the poor just to give them places to lay
their heads. And so, it is not surprising that after many years of our
independence, a situation could arise in which a woman, who deserves all the
respect in the world for being the mother of mankind, could be subjected to a
situation in which she has to give herself to a man just to get a ‘befitting’
place to sleep.
It is also worth noting that urban housing has
become a serious issue because of the high number of migrants who move from the
hinterlands to the city centres, but this situation would continue because of
the deplorable conditions these rural folks live in. Why then cannot we ensure
that we develop the districts and regions to make them more attractive to
retain those who may be forced into the cities to add up to the already
precarious situation there?
Governments must understand that, the only
reason why they are formed is to embark on policies that would benefit the
masses, and that social housing is about one of the most sensitive area our
leaders must begin to consider if we are to prevent a situation in which people
would have to do unthinkable things just to survive.
GNA